spring the bare
places are to be filled with trees that I have ordered: pines behind the
delicate acacias, and startling mountain-ashes, oaks, copper-beeches,
maples, larches, juniper-trees--was it not Elijah who sat down to rest
under a juniper-tree? I have often wondered how he managed to get under
it. It is a compact little tree, not more than two to three yards high
here, and all closely squeezed up together. Perhaps they grew more
aggressively where he was. By the time the babies have grown old and
disagreeable it will be very pretty here, and then possibly they won't
like it; and, if they have inherited the Man of Wrath's indifference to
gardens, they will let it run wild and leave it to return to the state
in which I found it. Or perhaps their three husbands will refuse to live
in it, or to come to such a lonely place at all, and then of course its
fate is sealed. My only comfort is that husbands don't flourish in the
desert, and that the three will have to wait a long time before enough
are found to go round. Mothers tell me that it is a dreadful business
finding one husband; how much more painful then to have to look for
three at once!--the babies are so nearly the same age that they only
just escaped being twins. But I won't look. I can imagine nothing more
uncomfortable than a son-in-law, and besides, I don't think a husband is
at all a good thing for a girl to have. I shall do my best in the years
at my disposal to train them so to love the garden, and out-door life,
and even farming, that, if they have a spark of their mother in them,
they will want and ask for nothing better. My hope of success is however
exceedingly small, and there is probably a fearful period in store for
me when I shall be taken every day during the winter to the distant
towns to balls--a poor old mother shivering in broad daylight in her
party gown, and being made to start after an early lunch and not
getting home till breakfast-time next morning. Indeed, they have already
developed an alarming desire to go to "partings" as they call them, the
April baby announcing her intention of beginning to do so when she is
twelve. "Are you twelve, Mummy?" she asked.

The gardener is leaving on the first of April, and I am trying to find
another. It is grievous changing so often--in two years I shall have
had three--because at each change a great part of my plants and plans
necessarily suffers. Seeds get lost, seedlings are not pricked out in
ti